NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY footnotes UMBER 1 N WINTER 2013 VOLUME 38 INSIDE 2 Patricia Neal’s gifts 10 Inside the Middle Ages 13 The Daily goes digital footnotes WINTER 2013, VOLUME 38, NUMBER 1 1 News Footnotes is published three times a year NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY by Northwestern University Library. LIBRARY 2 Patricia Neal’s gifts library.northwestern.edu BOARD OF GOVERNORS Artifacts of a remarkable life Dean of Libraries and Charles Deering Stephen M. Strachan, chair McCormick University Librarian: Robert D. Avery 8 Hidden treasures Sarah M. Pritchard Suzanne S. Bettman [email protected] Paul A. Bodine The tolls of Tarascon 10 Director of Development: Julie Meyers Brock Medieval commerce along the Rhone Carlos D. Terrazas John S. Burcher [email protected] Jane A. Burke 12 Events Jean K. Carton, life member Director of Library Public Relations: Gerald E. Egan Clare Roccaforte Harve A. Ferrill 13 Donor spotlight [email protected] John S. Gates Jr. Daniel S. Jones Byron L. Gregory Guest Editor and Writer: Daniel S. Jones Ellen Blum Barish James A. Kaduk [email protected] Victoria Mitchell Kohn Northwestern University is an equal James R. Lancaster opportu nity, affirmative action Stephen C. Mack educator and employer. Judith Paine McBrien Nancy McCormick © 2013 Northwestern University. Howard M. McCue III On the cover Promotional photograph Produced by University Relations. Deirdre McKechnie of Patricia Neal from the late 1940s 2-13/13M/NL-GD/1438-1 Peter B. McKee M. Julie McKinley Rosemary Powell McLean Our apologies William C. Mitchell William D. Paden In the previous issue of Footnotes, we inadvertently left out several names Sandi L. Riggs from the 2012 Honor Roll of Donors. We sincerely regret the omissions. Gordon I. Segal The Deering Society $250 to $499 Alan H. Silberman Eric B. Sloan $10,000 and more Donald E. Rome John H. Stassen Joan McKee John R. Snively Jane Urban Taylor Peter B. McKee Linda Snively John C. Ver Steeg Mark S. Stevens Alumni and Friends $500 to $999 $100 to $249 Sarah M. Pritchard, ex officio John P. Schmidt Richard O. Briggs Carlos D. Terrazas, ex officio b footnotes WINTER 2013 news Library’s Kaplan fellow writing Northwestern University Press. A profes- Leopold and Loeb book sionally trained chef, she contributes food- Nina Barrett has been selected as the related feature stories to Chicago’s NPR Library’s 2012–13 fellow at the University’s radio affiliate WBEZ, including a series Alice Kaplan Institute called Fear of Frying: Culinary Nightmares, for the Humanities. which earned the 2012 James Beard Award The fellowship grants for best radio show/audio webcast. her half-time release from her job as the Powerful finding aids “uncapped” Library’s communica- Last October University Library and the tions specialist—and as University of Chicago Library launched new finding aids for research in primary Nina Barrett Footnotes editor and writer—to concentrate archival sources. The Uncovering New on writing a book about the 1924 Leopold Chicago Archives Project (UNCAP.lib and Loeb murder case. .uchicago.edu) allows researchers to search Ramon Casas’s portrait of Erik Satie Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb both libraries’ strong archival collections were wealthy University of Chicago law using hundreds of finding aids. students who killed a 14-year-old boy in Sarah Pritchard, dean of libraries and stops at the National Gallery of Art in an attempt to commit the perfect murder. Charles Deering McCormick University Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum Tentatively titled The Leopold and Loeb Files: Librarian, says UNCAP is an important new of Art in New York, and the Cleveland An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most tool that can help scholars discover the Museum of Art. After the Paris exhibit the Famous Crimes, Barrett’s book is based on archival riches of their own institutions and painting traveled to Fundación MAPFRE in the 2009 exhibit she curated for the Library those of several others in the Chicago area. Madrid and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. called The Murder That Wouldn’t Die: Leopold “Collections of original archives, even “We are very careful when lending and Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction. North- in this digital age, are largely unique, physi- artifacts to other institutions,” Grafakos says, western University Press will publish the cal, complex, and place-bound resources for adding that her goal for the Paris trip was volume. making new discoveries. UNCAP ‘uncaps’ to be “a good steward of the painting.” them for a whole generation of students and Grafakos prepared a condition assessment scholars,” Pritchard says. before the painting left the Library and another after it arrived at the Grand Palais. Casas, on the road again She also observed the packing and unpack- Catalan artist Ramon Casas’s 1891 portrait ing, storage, and acclimatization processes of French composer Erik Satie, El Bohemio, as well as the portrait’s installation at the Poet of Montmartre, was escorted from the French museum. “This is a case that’s been heavily Library to Paris’s Grand Palais by conserva- When it is not on loan, Poet of fictionalized and mythologized from the tion librarian Tonia Grafakos last September. Montmartre hangs in Deering Library’s Art moment the newspapers started their sensa- The painting was part of the Grand Palais’s Collection. Originally owned by Charles tional reporting on it,” Barrett says. “The multimedia exhibit on the bohemian as Deering, who was a friend of Casas (1866– book is intended to strip away a lot of the hero in painting, literature, photography, 1932), the painting was given to the Library embellishing and give readers the very and music. by Deering’s daughter, Mrs. Chauncey immediate and intimate experience of the It’s not the first time the Casas has McCormick, in 1956. events of the case.” been on the road. The framed oil painting, Barrett has also written three books approximately 84 by 46 inches, traveled to published by Simon & Schuster and edited Barcelona and Madrid in 2001 and toured Deering Library: An Illustrated History for the United States in the mid-2000s, with WINTER 2013 footnotes 1 Patricia Neal’s gifts: Artifacts of a remarkable life o theater major Patsy Louise Neal, who arrived on Evanston may have struck her as a detour on the way to the campus in the fall of 1943 from Knoxville, Tennessee, New York stage, and Patsy would leave campus two years later. But TNorthwestern University was an inconvenient stop on during her time at Northwestern this talented young woman would her way to the Broadway stage. forge a lifelong professional connection with theater professor Alvina Earlier that year Patsy had seen The Three Sisters on Broadway, Krause and start building the skills and making the connections that and New York City had become her obsession. Her parents, Eura would help her become the Academy and Tony Award–winning and William, had moved their family of five from Packard, Kentucky, actress Patricia Neal. where Patsy was born in 1926, to Knoxville in 1929 when William If there were any doubts many years later about Patricia Neal’s was offered a job as a coal-company manager. The Neals, who had regard for the University she left, they were erased when, following dreams of security for their daughter, insisted that she get a formal their mother’s death in 2010, Neal’s two youngest daughters, Lucy “I secretly hoped I would be turned down. Evanston, Illinois, seemed a roundabout way to my dream.” college education. It “seemed utterly ridiculous to me,” wrote Neal and Ophelia, donated the largest collection of personal artifacts ever in her memoir, As I Am: An Autobiography. “Going to school to learn given to University Library from a celebrity alum. acting! My classroom could only be the real theater.” It is, according to University archivist Kevin Leonard, “an The School of Speech at Northwestern was suggested, she exceptional collection.” wrote, because “it had an excellent speech program and it was rela- The 80 boxes of family photographs, movie and magazine tively close to home.” Neal confessed that she secretly hoped that glamour shots, personal letters, scrapbooks, professional correspon- Northwestern would turn down her application: “Evanston, Illinois, dence, newspaper reviews, news clippings, magazine profiles, the- seemed a roundabout way to my dream.” ater programs, drafts of her memoir, legal and financial documents, Patricia Neal as 1946 Syllabus Queen WINTER 2013 footnotes 3 few freshmen to land a small role in Krause’s production of Beggar on Horseback, which was her Northwestern entrée onto the stage. In her memoir Neal wrote that she found her champion in Krause, the legendary acting teacher at Northwestern whose methods influ- enced the theater curriculum and the careers of such luminaries as Charlton Heston, Garry Marshall, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Robert Reed, and Tony Roberts. Letter from Alvina Krause (February 19, 1947) In the midst of the good fortune, though, Neal experienced the first of what would be a succession of very hard times when her father awards, and speeches that arrived at the Library in multiple install- died of a heart attack in April 1944 at age 49. The untimely death of ments last fall help tell the story. someone close to her would be repeated throughout Neal’s life. Neal’s campus and extracurricular activities created the foot- During her sophomore year Neal earned her second theatrical prints for her career. She pledged Pi Beta Phi in 1943 and stayed in role at Northwestern, this time as Olivia in Twelfth Night, and even touch with many of her sorority sisters, rooming with two of them though Krause thought her performance less than stellar, Neal was in New York when she was a struggling actress.